Amanda French

“‘A Strangely Useless Thing’: Iseult Gonne and Yeats” Amanda French Unlike her more famous mother, Iseult Gonne seems actively to have sought the supporting role of muse, which is of course one reason why she has never had a biography of her own. Even with that willingness, she never gained the kind of immortality Maud Gonne did through Yeats's poetry--yet the history of Iseult's relationship with the poet is interesting. Yeats had a front-row seat for Iseult’s maturation, and evidently perceived her in several ways over the course of her life: as an archetype of the compromised innocence of childhood, as a mirror image of Maud, and as the quintessence of wasted potential. Almost all published descriptions of Iseult Gonne portray her less as a personality than as an embodiment of some abstraction, some constant companion to other, more vivid human lives. This quality of her character--or perhaps of her fate--is somehow emblematized in the story of her conception. In 1890, Maud Gonne had a son with the French journalist and agitator Lucien Millevoye. The child died a year later.1 Yeats wrote in his autobiography that "The idea came to her that the lost child might be reborn, and she had gone back to Millevoye, in the vault under the memorial chapel. A girl child was born, now two years old" (Memoirs 133). Yeats both doubted and disapproved, but to Maud Iseult at first represented the child she had lost. Although her date of birth is misreported as 1895 in Nancy Cardozo's biography of Maud Gonne, and in the index to Yeats's Memoirs, Iseult was actually born on August 6, 1894 (Balliett 29). She was educated at a Carmelite convent in France, in Laval, but was probably never as innocent as that fact might sentimentally imply. For one thing, she was almost certainly aware from the beginning of her illegitimacy. Although Maud passed her off to the respectable world at large as her niece--or, as in her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, as "a charming child I had adopted" (Servant 296)--Iseult was known to be Maud Gonne's natural daughter by a great many people. Many Dubliners suspected that Yeats was the father, but Iseult herself was acquainted with Lucien Millevoye and knew that he was her father.2 Discussing Maud Gonne's life circa 1900, Nancy Cardozo writes that "Iseult was aware that Millevoye, who came for a visit now and then with gifts and a kiss, was her father. Later she considered him licentious, vaguely threatening" (197). When and why Iseult vouchsafed this opinion of her father Cardozo does not say, but it is interesting to note that there were at least two intimidating father figures in Iseult's childhood--another factor mitigating against innocence. John MacBride, too, was a disturbingly unstable father figure. Shortly after severing her connection with Lucien Millevoye, Maud met and then toured the United States with Major John MacBride, veteran of the war in South Africa and exile from Ireland. Maud married him on February 21, 1903 (Cardozo 229). Maud later asserted that Iseult, eight years old at the time, had immediately disliked MacBride: "She was such a beautiful and such a strangely wise child. She had cried when I told her I was getting married to MacBride and said she hated MacBride. I had felt like crying, too. I told her I would send her lovely things from Spain, where we were going for our honeymoon, but she was not consoled" (Servant 348). This story, from Maud's 1938 autobiography, is very probably inflected with all the retrospective prophecy of hindsight, for Maud's marriage to MacBride had ended in a nasty and very public separation in 1905. In her petition for divorce, Maud had charged MacBride with intemperance and cruelty, and worse. A French newspaper reported the accusation: "That Mr. M'Bride even went so far as to compromise a young girl who was under the protection of Mrs. M'Bride, and in the absence of the latter at Colleville in the summer of 1903 he had adulterous relations with her." At the time, Maud had two "young girls" living with her. Iseult would have been nine years old; Eileen Wilson [Maud's illegitimate half-sister], sixteen. Gossip still current in Dublin, and in academic circles, indicates an incident that involved Iseult. (Balliett 36-37) Whether the incident involved Eileen, as Cardozo claims; or Iseult, as a comment in an autobiographical novel by Francis Stuart suggests; or whether MacBride accosted both (or neither) of the girls, it is clear that MacBride was not a benevolent presence in the family. The relevant passage from Black List, Section H, a late novel by Iseult's husband Francis Stuart, is somehow convincing in its offhandedness; though at second-hand, in a novel written fifty years after the incident, it can hardly be cited as evidence: H [Francis Stuart] saw she would have haggled over it at the shop while preserving her cool, rather disdainful composure, in the way that she could relate intimacies about her father or Yeats; there was also an anecdote about how her stepfather, John MacBride, had made advances to her as a child, with the same detached air. Whereas he realized that he couldn't argue over money or talk of sex without personal involvement. (Black List 34) An interesting point about this passage is that it contains the barest suggestion that there were "intimacies," perhaps sexual in nature, with Yeats and even with Millevoye for Iseult to tell. Cardozo's unelaborated comment that Iseult regarded her father as "licentious" and "vaguely threatening" takes on a new aspect in the context of possible abuse by her step-father, and certainly adds a new dimension to Yeats's later proposal of marriage. While Iseult was growing up, then, Yeats was probably the closest person to a benevolent, encouraging father in her life, nurturing her especially in poetic and artistic pursuits. Ella Young described this tutelage, which she had observed on a visit to Maud's house in Passy in 1908: Iseult, Maud Gonne's adopted daughter, has taken it upon herself to instruct Shaun [sic] in Art, Poetry, and Literature. She, herself, is being instructed in these branches by William Butler Yeats who is in Paris just now and comes to the house in Passy every day. Iseult, a beautiful dark-eyed dark-haired girl of twelve or thirteen, can hold her own in every discussion. She has a lovely voice, and the Poet is teaching her to chant verse as he thinks it should be chanted. He is desirous of chanting verse to the sound of a plangent string, a note now and then for accompaniment or emphasis. Maud Gonne is rather in favor of the voice alone. (Young 102) Throughout her life, both Yeats and Maud Gonne would encourage Iseult to use her intellectual and artistic capacities, but despite (or because) of this, she never managed to sustain any significant literary output. She had told Yeats that "she preferred the Iliad to any other book"; this preference may have been the cause of Yeats's interest in her, as Hone asserts, but it may also have been the result of that interest (Hone 253). Interestingly, her young brother Séan MacBride would grow up to be a major political figure in Ireland: first as a lieutenant, at the age of sixteen, in the newly-formed IRA, and then eventually as a senator and Nobel prize winner. In him seemed to be concentrated all Maud's political talent, while Iseult was earmarked to take after Yeats, her spiritual father, although she ultimately failed or refused this task. At the age of fourteen Iseult asked Yeats to marry her, with what degree of gravity we cannot know. He refused "because there was too much Mars in her horoscope" (Jeffares MP 190, Cardozo 275); which would mean that she was overly aggressive, quick-tempered, and/or prone to self-destruction. The planet Mars also controls sexual initiative, so this may have been Yeats's way of reprimanding the young girl for such a proposition. As a Leo, Iseult was already ruled by a particularly ambitious and arrogant sun sign. Portraits and some prose descriptions of her suggest, by contrast, that she was ethereal, melancholy, exotic, slightly nervous--one of Maud Gonne's biographers, Samuel Levenson, favors the term "pre-Raphaelite" (Levenson 333). Yeats often spent summers with Maud Gonne and her family at Les Mouettes (The Seagulls), Maud's villa in Normandy, in the town of Colleville.3 In August of 1912, when Iseult was barely eighteen, Yeats and Iseult cemented their relationship. Joseph Hone describes Iseult’s voluntary apprenticeship: While with the Gonnes in Normandy in August 1912, he wrote his Rosicrucian 'Mountain Tomb' and a poem for Iseult Gonne, and worked at intervals on a preface for a book of Lord Dunsany's stories, and on an introduction to Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore's translations from his own Bengali. The poems deeply moved the heart of the young and lovely Iseult, who asked Yeats to get her a Bengali grammar and dictionary so that she might read Tagore in the original. (Hone 281, see also Jeffares MP 167, 183) The poem Yeats wrote to Iseult, "To a Child Dancing in the Wind," appeared in Responsibilities (1914). "Dance there upon the shore;" the poem counsels: "What need have you to care / For wind or water's roar?" (Poems 122, lines 1-3).4 Interestingly, the image of the shore appears and reappears in writings about or by Iseult, probably at least partly because of her name, which suggests the medieval lover of Tristan waiting on the grey coast of Normandy.

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